174 Cuba, the Black Panther Parry, and the U.S.

Black Movement in the 1960s

Conclusion
The issue of security-both the Black leaders' individual safety concerns and Cuba's
national security-was decided by the outcome of the struggle to set policy that raged
between the two Cuban factions throughout the first half of the decade. The traditional
Communist Party, or pro-Moscow, faction, which eventually prevailed, sought to move
Cuba into the Soviet camp for protection and economic stability. The Guevarists, by
contrast, lobbied for spearheading the forceful overthrow of the world capitalist system
in order to ultimately safeguard Cuban security without sacrificing its independent
revolutionary path.
Addressing Black leaders' personal safety eoncerns within the fluctuations of Cuban
security policy was in many ways a difficult task. Every U.S. Black leader faced a threat
to his or her personal safety, as illustrated in the harassment and eventual assassinations
of King and Malcolm X. The FBI, in coordination with other enforcement agencies,
waged a massive and in many ways illegal counterintelligence effort throughout the
decade to crush the Black movement.
Therefore, as desperate exiles fled to Cuba seeking shelter in the allegedly revolu
tionary and sympathetic state, the debate between the Guevarists and the pro-Soviets over
the most effective national security strategy was thrown into sharp relief. The limits to
Cuban solidarity were tested throughout the decade and beyond by Black activists such
as Robert WIlliams and Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, and Assata
Shakur seeking exile.
The sojourns of Williams and Cleaver illustrate the erratic shifts in Cuban policy
toward the U.S. movement. Far from the omnipotent and omnipresent leader that he is
usually considered, Castro was often perceived by both Williams and Cleaver as being
unaware of or misinformed about aetual policy actions taken toward U.S. Blacks, as re
actionary elements within the regime impeded communication and relations with some
militants. Both of these leaders eventually left Cuba, citing a betrayal of revolutionary
ideals on the part of powerful Communist Party stalwarts.
1\vo years before his death, Eldridge Cleaver reflected on the Black Panther Party's
relationship with the evolving regime in its nascent years: "Although some of the Cubans
certainly believed there could be a U.S. revolution, you have to distinguish between
politics and practice. In looking at whether the Cubans are 'revolutionary,' both in their
official political statements and their voting record at the United Nations they never
waivered from total support of the Black Movement. But in practice, that's where prob
lems came in. They would invite African Americans to be there for special occasions, but
the problem lay in the kind of actual support we needed to make the revolution here in the
Unites States.,,47 In the end, this is where the Cuban regime fell short in the minds of
many 1960s Black radicals who were desperately seeking that elusive international ally
willing to risk all for the revolution in the belly of the beast.
L.. (
.._ I
>",,1 .
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"'.\1 (' :0 .t!.L
,'-J :.) ti.)'(1;k' T.
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2CC> 1 . - fi4 Bt:t:.
13
"Revolutionary Art Is a Tool
for Liberation"
Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at the Black Panther
Erika Doss
A poster-size drawing by Emory Douglas titled Shoot to Kill (figure 1) occupied the back
page of the November 21, 1970 issue of the Black Panther, the Black Panther Party's
newspaper. The drawing, which featured scenes of black men killing white policemen,
was subtitled "Our Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, Teaches: 'We Have to Begin to
Draw Pictures That Will Make People Go Out and Kill Pigs.'"
As the authors of a government report remarked in the mid-1970s, the Black
Panthers were "blessed with a theatrical sixth sense that enabled them to gain an
audience and project an image [that] frightened America."l Recognition of that image is
central to an understanding of the Panthers and their politics. Emory Douglas, the
primary artist at the Black Panther during the party's peak from the late 19608 to the
early 1970s, produced hundreds of pictures promoting the Panthers' program of armed
militance and community welfare. Challenging long-standing assumptions about race
and racism in America, Douglas crafted a protest aesthetic aimed at eonvincing
audiences of black power.
In a 1970 essay in the Black Panther, Douglas detailed the eentral role of visual
images in raising revolutionary consciousness: "Revolutionary art gives a physical con
frontation with the tyrants, and also strengthens people to continue their vigorous attack.
Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation." Insisting, in another newspaper essay, that "all
progressive artists take up their paints and brushes in one hand and their gun in the other:'
Douglas instructed revolutionary artists to paint pictures of "fascist judges, lawyers, gen
erals, pig policeman, firemen, Senators, Congressmen, governors, Presidents, et al.,
being punished for their criminal acts against the American people and the struggling
people of the world. Their bridges, buildings, electric plants, pipelines, all of the Fascist
American empire must be blown up in our pictures.,,2
This chapter was published in New political Science 21, no.2 (June 1999), as a revised version of a
paper presented at the conference "Toward a History of the 19608:' University of Wisconsin,
Madison, April 1993. For an expanded version see Erika Doss, "Imaging the Panthers:
Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s-1990s." Prospects: An Annual of American
Studies 23 (1998). pp. 470-493. The author would especially like to thank Emory Douglas, John
Genoari, Rickie Solinger, and Rebecca Yule for their assistance and advice with this essay.
176 "Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation" Erika Doss 177
.fc,.I.:on1I0UGUS.TE:A(HIS .
WiE H',V;E!'l'O"!t;EflIN to.DRAW PJelURES ntAl
'WIUMAKE PEOPLE
t;:/ 80 OUl AND
KILLPI8$
Figure 1 Emory Douglas, Shoot to Kill, 1970. Offset collage, Black
Panther, November 21, 1970. Courtesy The Center for the Study of
Political Graphics (CSPG), Los Angeles.
From 1967 to 1973 Douglas matched his rhetorical call to arms with the pictures he
produced for the Black Panther. Ranging from inflammatory images of resistance and The Panthers counted on media, both their own and that of the mainstream press, to
revolution such as Shoot to Kill to drawings that focused on inner-city poverty and the spread their message. Reporters flocked to the Panthers, certainly led by the promise of a
need for social and political change (figure 2), Douglas's pictures were highly visible and good story about American anarchy but perhaps more attracted by the Panthers' own
highly regarded within the party during the Black Power era. visual presence. With their black berets and leather jackets, their Afros, dark glasses,
Figure 2 Emory Douglas, When I Spend More Time . .. , c. 1971. Back
page drawing, Black Panther. Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.
The Black Panthers and Visual Imagery
178 "Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation"
raised fists, and military drill fonnation, the Panthers made great visual copy. This was no
accident: the Panthers were extraordinarily astute about the appeal and influence of vi
sual imagery as a tool for raising political consciousness. Huey Newton's assertion that
"the Black community is basically not a reading community" may be considered an ac
knowledgment of the central importance of oral expression in African-American culture.
But it also suggests an understanding that in the modem age people increasingly gained
their infonnation, knowledge, and political and cultural directives from visual sources.
As Douglas echoed, "Every revolutionary movement that I've known of has some type of
revolutionary art:,3 Indeed, the pictorial, the visual, becanle an essential component of
Panther ideology. Their dramatic redefinition of black identity, and in particular their as
sault on previously held assumptions of the passivity and powerlessness of black men,
garnered the Panthers immediate attention. Their canny attention to visual authority
made the Panthers' mode of self-representation the image of 1960s radicalism.
Contesting mainstream caricatures of black men, the Panthers also defied middle
class and liberal representations of black masculinity tentatively put in place by the lead
ers and followers of the civil rights movement. The Panthers projected black power, not
egalitarianism. If Martin Luther King Jr. tried to challenge dominant racist stereotypes by
claiming black men as citizen-subjects, the Panthers subverted that civil rights image by
reconfiguring and romanticizing black men as the very embodiment of revolutionary
rage, defiance, and misogyny. "We shall have our manhood," Eldridge Cleaver insisted in
Soul on Ice (1968), adding, "We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts
to gain it." Angered by the linlited field of integration and autonomy that the civil rights
movement had achieved, alienated by older, "establishment" patterns of political ac
tivism, and incensed by their ongoing status as second-class Americans, the Black
Panthers (like other black liberation movements of the 1960s) "sought to clear the ground
for the cultural reconstruction of the black subject.,,4
Both civil rights and revolutionary black nationalist movements saw that black sub
ject primarily on masculine tenns: the placards carried by striking sanitation workers in
Memphis in 1968, for example, asserted "1 Am a Man." The Black Panther Party's inter
est in more aggressive fonns of masculinity followed from perceptions of very real
threats to America's black men-from the large numbers of black men drafted into the
U.S. military during the Vietnam War to blatant fonns of domestic oppression. Believing
that the civil rights movement had failed to alleviate those threats and as such was physi
cally, psychologically, and socially impotent, the Panthers devised a forceful inlage of
black masculinity that asscrted male power in a mostly male sphere.
In so Q.oing, they clearly aimed to recuperate the socially constructed masculine at
tributes of power, militarism, independcnce, and control that had been denied subordi
nated black men since slavery. But by aligning black masculinity with symbols and
styles traditionally associated with potent white masculinity, the Panthers also rein
scribed the most egregious forms of patriarchal f,rivilege and domination, from
machismo and misogyny to violence and aggression. Their heterosexist and homopho
bic brand of revolutionary black nationalism excluded black women and homosexuals
and linlited the context of black liberation and black power to conflicts over the defini
tion and manifestation of black masculinity. Rather than reconstructing black masculin
ity on tenns that would have truly disturbed white power, the Panthers aided in codifying
the obviously still current cultural demonization of both black male youth and political
radicalism.
Affinning the Panthers' demand for a specifically masculinist black power, one of
the fIrst writers to depict them titled his 1971 book A Panther Is a Black Cat. The
Panthers, Reginald Major declared, were soldiers at war in "the jungle which is
Erika Doss 179
America," warriors "moving to bring greatness to the American Experience" by "com
pleting the work begun by the revolution of 1776.,,6 Militarism and military metaphors
were rampant among the Panthers, not simply because they saw the struggle for black
power as a battle against white oppression but because 1960s America was itself thor
oughly steeped in military action and rhetoric, ovcrseas and at home. It became Emory
Douglas's job to visualize the militance of the Black Panther Party and to articulate an
inlage of black masculine power that meshed with the party's overall ambitions. In May
1967 Douglas took over the layout and visual renderings for the Black Panthel: Working
side by side with Cleaver and Newton, Douglas created a visually dominant newspaper
style that one managing editor described as "a tremendous factor" in the Black Panther's
circulation, which reached over 100,000 weekly by 1969 (fairly high volume for under
ground newspapers at the time) and was the "most reliable and lucrative source of in
come for the party:,7
Emory Douglas and the Btack Panther
From the start, Douglas's visual style was direct and angry, its content rooted in years of
urban poverty in San Francisco's black slums, its pictorial sensibility nourished in re
fonn-school printing shops and in college art classes. As one author notes, "The story of
Emory Douglas's harrowing youth is the story of the breeding of a Black Panther." Born
in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1943, Douglas moved with his mother to the Bay Area in
1951 after her stonny relationship with his father ended in divorce. While his mother
found work operating a concession stand at Juvenile Hall, an arm of San Francisco's
Youth Guidance Center, Douglas worked on his "rep" as a brawler and burglar. In 1958,
double-charged with truancy and fighting, he wound up at Log Cabin Ranch, a rural fa
cility for juvenile offenders. Douglas spent a year there, assigned in particular the tasks of
"taking care of the pigs and keeping the pigpen clean." When he left Log Cabin Ranch,
he entered San Francisco's predominantly black Polytechnic High School. After being
arrested on burglary charges, Douglas was sentenced to fifteen months at the Youth
Training School in Ontario, California, ncar the men's prison in Chino. His work-study
experience there was concentratcd in the prison's printing shop, and after his release,
Douglas decided to pursue commercial art.
In 1964 Douglas began taking graphic design courses at San Francisco's City
College. He also joined the college's Black Students Union and was drawn to political
activism. Doing classroom assigmnents geared at teaching artists how to appeal to the
tastes and dollars of mainstream consumers, Douglas made drawings of black con
sumers: "One of the school projects involved our doing story board drawings for an ani
mated film. I chose to do a 'brother' being denied courtesy and service in a public place
until he donned the garb of an African V.I.P. As [the teacher] took a look at what I was
doing he suggested that I needed to be more provocative .... Ha ha ha hal The man had
no idea how provocative I actually was. The thing was that I hadn't been able up to that
time to apply my anger to my drawing and painting."
Tossing aside "aspirations to join the bourgeoisie" of mainstream commercial
advertising, Douglas put his aesthetic energies into designing props for the theater work
shops that playwright and poet LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka) gave while teaching at San
Francisco State College in the mid-1960s.
9
He also became involved in the Black Panther
Party. As he recalled, "I was drawn to it because of its dedication to self-defense. The
civil rights movement headed by Dr. King turned me off at that time, for in those days
180 "Revolutionary Art [s a Tool for Liberation"
nonviolent protest had no appeal for me. And although the rebellions in Watts, Dctroit, and
Ncwark werc not wcll organized they did appeal to my nature. I could identify with
them."10 As a "brother off the block," Douglas found the Panthers' message of aggressive
self-reliance and revolutionary action far more persuasive than the principles of pacifism
and negotiation at the core of civil rights discourse. The Panthers specifically to the
social reality of his urban life. They valorized an image ofhard-core, militant, virile, and in
. vincible black manhood already prevalent among the youthful black male underclass, and
fuscd it with a political culture that similarly justified street violence and outlaw behavior.
Joining Huey Newton, Douglas was onc of scveral heavily armed Panthers who, in
February 1967, "escorted" Bctty Shabazz during the First Annual Malcolm X Grassroots
Memorial at Hunter's Point, a predominantly black community in San Francisco.
to the PR opportunities inherent in their protection of Malcolm X's widow, Newton's
Panthers were eager to shape their first testing of the media waters around claims to
Shabazz, the fact that shc had actually been invited to speak by the Black Panther
Party of Northern California. The press played into Newton's hands, producing headlines
such as "A Army" in the San Francisco Chronicle. I I Soon joined by Cleaver,
Newton's Panthers went on to become the Black Panthers, and the San Francisco group
aligned with the Afrocentrism of Maulana Karenga's US (United Slaves) organization.
The split was hardly amicable: repeatedly over the next few years, the Black Panther fea
tured vicious cartoons and blistering essays blasting the "armchair revolutionaries" of
cultural nationalism, for whom black liberation was found in "back to black" clothing,
hairstyles, language, and holidays (cf. Kwanzaa) rather than in armed resistance and rev
olution. Bobby Seale sneercd, "I have a natural and I like it, but power for the people
doesn't grow out of the sleeve of a dashiki."12
Emory Douglas was present, too, at the Panther's next heavily publicized action. On
May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale and thirty fully uniformed, fully armed Panthers stormed the
California State Capitol in Sacramento to protest the Mulford Bill, an ordinance moti
vated by Oakland police fears of armed black resistance and aimed at curtailing the
Panthcrs by banning the display of loadcd guns in public. Eldridge Cleaver was prescnt
as well, as a reporter for Ramparts. While Governor Ronald Reagan's handlers
hustled him inside the building (hc'd been giving a speech to a teenage group of Future
Youth Leadcrs on the capitol lawn), thc Panthers made their way toward the state asscm
and Seale delivered Executive Mandate No.1, a lengthy statement condemning not
thc pending bill but the "racist California Legislature" and the "racist war of geno
cide in Vietnam." The journalists and news reporters who had come out in droves to cover
the story asked Seale to read it again and he did, twice.
13
Media coverage of the Panthers "invasion" of Sacramento (and the arrcst of over
twenty Panthers, including Douglas, on their way back to Oakland) swelled. U.S. News
and World Report demonized the Panthers as a gang of "armed Negroes" who had swept
through capitol corridors crowded with schoolchildren. Photographs showing the
Panthers as a disciplined and tough-looking cadre of militant and macho revolutionaries
were published in Life and Time and the New York Times Magazine. Angela Davis, then
studying in Frankfurt at the Gocthe Institute with Theodor Adorno, recalls seeing the
image of "leather-jacketed, black-bereted warriors standing with guns at the entrance to
the California legislature" in German newspapers. The "appeal" of that image called her
back to thc United States "into an organizing frenzy in the streets of South Central Los
Angeles." But it also, she would later write, came to represent the problematic
"masculinist dimensions of black nationalism." 14
Out on bail after returning from Sacramento, Douglas began full-time work at the
Black Panther. Breaking away from Baraka, who had become deeply involved with cul-
Erika Doss 181
tural nationalism, Douglas in his earliest newspaper art mostly attacked counterrevolu
tionary "paper panthers" opposed to armcd resistance. One 1967 editorial by Cleaver
damning the "scurvy-ness of the NAACP" was accompanied by Douglas's montage of a
"bootlickers gallery," which positioned photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Rustin, and Roy Wilkins against a crude cartoon of a prostrate black man
cowboy boots of President Lyndon Johnson. Douglas's scornful caricatures of the "Old
Toms" of the civil movement, and his insinuations as to their apparent complicity
with mainstream American politics, helped visually prop the aggressive and oppositional
tenets of the Black Panther Party. Within a year, however, Douglas (known as "Emory" in
the party and at the newspaper, as he signed his drawings with his first name) developed
a more refined and brightly colored graphics style of "revolutionary art" that conccn
trated on "new images of victory" to "get the defeatist attitude out of the people's
minds.,,15 He also writing newspaper essays and giving speeches on revolutionary
art's centrality to black liberation.
Reproaching thc social realism of an earlier generation of black artists, Douglas
remarked, "Charles White used to draw various pictures dealing with the social injustices
the people suffer but it was civil rights art." White's 1950s images of "mothers scrubbing
the floors" were "valid," said Douglas, but they wcren't geared toward raising revolution
ary consciousness. Dismissing too, many contemporary black artists, especially
musicians, Douglas wrote: "What I see Aretha [Franklin] and B. B. King singing about is
cultural nationalism from the beginnings of slavery up to now. But it isn't anything that
TRANSCENDS COMMUNITIES and creates revolution.,,16 The civil rights movement,
and the art associated with it, were seen by the Panthers as toothless and soft; the "soul
style" sensitivity of cultural nationalism was viewed on similarly derisive terms. In con
trast, Douglas crafted a hard and unyielding visual narrative grounded in black rcsistance
and revolution.
The revolutionary artist, Oy extension, was committed foremost to the revolution.
As Black Panther artist Brad Brewer explained in 1970, "The primary thing about a rev
olutionary artist is that he is a revolutionary first. The question confronting Black
today is not whether or not he or she is 'Black' but whether or not he or she is a revolu
tionary. With politics the brush, and the gun protecting them both, the potential
Black revolutionary could rid themselves of their tendencies of cultural national
ism. Because their talents are in behalf of preparing for revolution, they aren't in
volved in dealing in life style but rather [in] offering solutions.,,17
Douglas found aesthetic inspiration for those solutions in "the art coming out of the
struggle in Vietnam. Their pictures ... always express the victorious spirit, a picture of a
mother holding her baby-we will fight from one generation to thc next!"IR Sixties-era
underground newspapers attentive to international struggle frequently reprinted the well
designed, semiabstract posters produced by OSPAALA (the Organization of Solidarity
of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Many, including the Black Panther,
subscribed to the Liberation News Service and received twice-weekly mailings of news
bulletins, feature articles, and graphics detailing armed revolution around thc world.
Inspired by propaganda posters from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Cuba picturing heroic
sword- or gun-toting peasants-male and female-in indigenous garb, Douglas often
pictured Panthers similarly outfitted in cotton pajamas and thongs, draped in bandoliers,
carrying rifles.
The fact that few, if any, Black Panthers dressed this way, much less carried
Kalishnikovs, didn't matter: this was revolutionary art that transcended the realities of
inner-city America in deference to a vision of global black liberation. Women had a place
in this revolutionary art, too: Douglas's 1969 cartoon All Power to the People depicts a
182 "Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation"
Figure 3 Emory Douglas, Revolutionary Art Exhibit, 1969. Offset
print, Black Panther, October 10, 1970. Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.
black female, machete in tow, hawking copies of the Black Panther; Revolutionary Art
Exhibit (figure 3; 1969), a poster Douglas designed to advertise a display of his pictures,
illustrates a,black mother cradling her child, dressed in a cotton shift and head scarf, a
rifle slung over her back. But by casting black women within conventional and limited
roles, as salesgirls and mothers, for instance, Douglas reinforced the patriarchal conceits
that largely dominated the Black Panthers' political image and program.
Erika Doss 183
Honing the City College commercial art lessons that had given him "insights into how
to appeal to the andience I was trying to reach," Douglas turned Madison Avenue advertis
and global agitprop into a form of revolutionary art aimed at empowering the Black
Panther Party. Perceiving a key relationship bctween black liberation and pictures, Douglas
stressed the educative and preparative role of revolutionary art, and laid out the precise
means by which revolutionary artists were to operate. Rather than forecasting a utopian fu
ture to be lived after the revolution, revolutionary artists were instructed to illustrate the on
going political struggle: "When we say that we want decent housing, we must have pictures
that relIect how we're going to get decent housing." Taking their eues from Fanon's advice
that the oppressed must destroy their oppressors, revolutionary artists were ordered to "cre
ate brand new images of revolutionary action for the entire community" that would con
vince "the vast majority of black people-who aren't readers but activist&--[ that 1through
their observation of our work, they feel they have the right to destroy the enemy." I
9
In a 1968 issue of the Black Panther, Douglas listed the images that revolutionary
artists should cull to elicit such reactions:
We draw pictures ofour brothers with stoner guns with one bullet going throughforty pigs,
taking out their intestines along the way . ... We draw pictures that show Standard Oil in
milk bottles launched at Rockefeller with the wicks made of cloth from T. Magnin . ...
This is revolutionary art--pigs lying in alleyways of the colony dead with their eyes
gouged out . ... Pictures that show black people kicking down prison gates-sniping
bombers, shooting down helicopters, police, mayors, governors, senators, assemblymen,
congressmen, firemen, newsmen, businessmen, Americans
20
In each edition of the Black Panther, Douglas matched these scenes with quotes and slo
gans from Panther leaders or from the pages of various revolutionary tracts: "By Any
Means Necessary," "In Defense of Self-Defense," "All Power to the People."
Concentrating especially on pictures of young, gun-wielding black men, sometimes
dressed in Black Panther regalia and sometimes outfitted in military uniforms appropri
ated from OSPAALA or Liberation News Service images of international freedom fight
ers, Douglas provided an iconography that clearly supported the Panthers' profoundly
militant and masculinist thrust.
If pictures of black men hoisting guns were essential to the Panther's ideological
directives, Douglas's most influential images were those of black men fighting
polieemen. Considered the in-house "expert on the way pigs look and act" becausc of his
pigpen chores at the Log Cabin Ranch reform school, Douglas has been credited with in
venting the era's visual symbolization of policemen as fat, mean, uniformed pigs.
Linking policemen with pigs actually has much earlier roots: Francis Grose's 1811
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has: "Pig, police officer. A China Street pig; a Bow
Street officer. Floor the pig and bolt; knock down the officer and run away." Still, if not
exactly an innovation of the Black Power movement, Douglas's cartoons helped revital
ize a broad national trend of vilifying cops as pigs. His pig pictures were a regular feature
in Black Panther, and "readers looked forward every week to seeing them:.2l Douglas
later extended this anthropomorphic demonization to represent politicians as rats and
businessmen as vultures.
The purpose of his caricatures, said Douglas, was "to make the people aware of the
character of those who oppressed us" and to provide visual examples that would inspire
them to "revolt against the slavemasters" and "kill the pigs." Some cartoons highlighted
the badge numbers of policemen "who were harassing blacks in the community." Others
were more ideological: one 1969 cartoon featured four hogs swinging from a tree, labeled
184 "Revolutionary Art Is a Toolfor Liberation"
respectively "AVARICIOUS BUSINESSMEN," "DEMAGOGUE POLITICIANS:' "PIG
COPS," and "U,S. MILITARY." The text below read: "ON LANDSCAPE ART: 'It is
good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by his mother f-kin neck'"
(figure 4)?2
With their straightforward slogans and images, Douglas's pig pictures recast
despised figures of institutional authority in negative symbolic form. The contrast
between the clarity of his political cartoons and the "happy" type and obfuscated
imagery of the psychedelic styles used in other 1960s-era underground newspapers is
obvious. Keyed to revolutionary instruction rather than counterculture euphoria,
Douglas's artwork was visual reinforcement for a radical politics of militant black
struggle; the pictorial linchpin, as he explained, to a "revolutionary culture that serves
the people.'.23
Douglas's Effects on Others
During his years with the Black Panther, Douglas shaped a protest aesthetic with which
the Black Panther Party aspired to revolutionize the black masses. Along with Fanon's
Wretched of the Earth and Bakunin's Catechism of the Revolutionist, Douglas's pictures
ofl:>lack men fighting pig-policemen, and his heroizing posters of "Bobby" and "Huey,"
were aimed at generating ideological conviction among the black lumpcn. For white
leftists who claimed the Panthers as "irresistible allies," and for Panther leaders who
found power in pictures, Douglas's art was held in highest esteem. Eldridge Cleaver
claimed that "the ideology of the Black Panther Party and the teachings of Huey P.
Newton are contained in their purest form in Emory's art." Reginald Major boasted
that "Emory, as artist, is more of a vanguard than the Panthers as politicians," and added,
"As an artist, he has more effective freedom of expression than Eldridge as a writer, or
Hilliard [David Hilliard, Panther Chief of Staff] as an orator. Emory's views on the pur
poses of revolutionary art have had a decided influence on the politics of the Party." His
art had immense visual cachet with black audiences: the Black Student's Union at San
Francisco State College adopted his image of a "loin-clothed black man with a gun in
one hand and a book in the other as the symbol of their educational aspirations." In
homes across America, Douglas's poster-portraits of Panther personalities bedecked liv
ing room walls.z
4
The Black Panther Party advanced the visual appeal of Douglas's pictures by often
printing ten to twenty thousand copies of posters and circulating them throughout urban
black neighborhoods. From "the Christian to the brother on the block, the college student
and the high school drop-out, the street walker and the secretary, the pimp and the
preachcr," revolutionary art, said Douglas, was for everybody. The ghetto, he added, was
"the gallery" for the revolutionary artist. "His art is plastered on the walls, in store front
windows, on fences, doorways, telephone poles and booths, passing busses, alleyways,
gas stations, barber shops, beauty parlors, laundry mats, liquor stores, as well as the huts
of the ghetto." Douglas believed in the revolutionary power of art, and often stated that
image making and consumption were, in and of themselves, revolutionary praxis. "The
people are the masterpieces," he intoned, thus rejecting art-world ideas about aesthetic
autonomy and insisting on revolutionary culture's popUlist (albeit primarily male) and
pragmatic underpinnings. "The community," he recalls, "was the museum for our art
work. Some people saw art for the first time when they saw my posters. Some joined the
Black Panther Party, some got inspired to make art toO.,,25
Erika Doss 185
Figure 4 Emory Douglas, On Landscape Art. 1969. Offset print,
Black Panther, January 4,1969. Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.
Some of those inspired were community muralists. Throughout the late 1960s,
urban artists painted gigantic Walls of Dignity and Walls of Respect on the sides and
facades of inner-city buildings, representing Panthers en masse and Panthers engaged in
standoffs and shoot-outs with the police. Other Mrican American artists produced simi
larly militant and visually compelling prints, posters, and easel paintings focused on
black power. Faith Ringgold's The Flag Is Bleeding (1967) and David Hammons's
186 "Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation"
Injustice Case (1970) utilized the American flag's symbolic reference to freedom
dce to point out thc duplicity of such imagery: in Ringgold's painting, a black man
pledges allegianee to that flag with blood pouring from his heart; in Hammon's body
print, a black man bound and gagged in a courtroom chair (a nod to Bobby Seale's treat
ment during the 1969 trial of the Chicago 8) looks in anguish and anger at that flag. In
Fred Hampton's Door (1970), Dana Chandler paid tribute to the chief of the Chicago
Panthers, slain when police fired more than ninety rounds of ammunition through his
apartment. Painting his picture of Hampton's bullet-ridden door a vivid red, and then
shooting at the finished painting and piercing it with bullet holes, Chandler remarked,
''I'm not trying to be aesthetically pleasing. I'm trying to be relevant.,,26
Like Douglas, most of these artists aimed at raising revolutionary consciousness by
picturing black struggle and liberation primarily on masculinist terms. Others,
including sculptors Betye Saar and Elizabeth Catlett, were also inspired by the anger
and violence of the Black Power movement's protest aesthetics, but challenged its
exclusionary preoccupation with black men. In The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
and Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), Saar and Catlett, respectively, drew on
the guns and fists of Panther iconography and raised questions about black power's
patriarchal focus: Saar posing a stereotypical Mammy (broom in one hand, rifle in the
other) against a Warholesque grid of Aunt Jemima pancake-mix boxes; Catlett paying
tribute to the stylized figure of a woman giving the Black Power salute?7 But their
depictions were exceptional: most African-American protest artists of the Black Power
era were more engrossed with the threatening image of aggressive black masculinity
that the Panthers projected.
Emory Douglas stayed at the Black Panther until the newspaper folded in 1979. But
his art shifted from inflammatory images of resistance and revolution to the "loves, joys,
hopes and dreams of black people in America: the bright side as well as the dark side of
life." Abandoning the militant and masculinist underpinnings once central to Panther ide
ology, Douglas now concentrated on pictures of black families and black children and
imaged African-American solidarity. As he explained in 1993, "My art was a reflection of
the politics of the party, so when the party changed to community action so did my art,
from pigs to kids.,,28 Other African-American artists also abandoned the Black Power
movement's protest aesthetic: Betye Saar, for example, began to make shrines and altars
that reclaimed ethnic and minority histories and religions, and which dealt extensively
with her powerful female ancestors. As she explained in 1975, "Now, my messages are
more subtle. There is more secretiveness about them because I think this represents the
way Black People feel about the movement today. They've got over the violent part and
have beeome more introspective.,,29
Douglas had initially used his protest aesthetic to convince black audiences about
the efficacy of a radical black political culture. By the early 1970s, however, that aes
thetic was being used in ways that challenged the original meaning and intentionality of
revolutionary art. The pig-policeman image that Douglas reinvigorated was appropriated
by American cops, who began sporting buttons marked Pl.G.-"Pride, Integrity, Guts."
Black Powerfists became the design motifs for consumer items ranging from coffee table
sculptures to rings. Black men wearing Afros and leather coats were cast as the macho
antiher(')Cs of blaxploitation movies like Shaft (1971).30 Even if such films as Melvin Van
Peebles's 1972 movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song challenged dominant cultural
assumptions about black men, they reproduced and strengthened the tropes of a raging,
outlaw, heterosexual, and sexist black masculinity that the Panthers had themselves
helped set in place only a few years earlier. While liberatory visions of justice and the
possibilities of a transformative political culture largely evaporated, the visualization of
Erika Doss 187
black patriarchal power that the Black Panther Party promoted in the late 1960s and early
1970s spread.
The impact of the women's movement, the economic changes rendered by deindus
trialization, the antiminority actions of current political culture, and the grim statistics re
garding unemployment, imprisonment, and average life expectancy for black men in
America are all factors that have led many African-American men in the 1 990s to glance
backward at the Panthers and to resuscitate the last set of images that represented black
power and patriarchal control. Likewise, as figures such as Louis Farrakhan aim to gen
erate a new politicized public culture for black Americans, they too draw on the patriar
chal dimensions of Black Power, whereby black men assume control of the black family
and black life. However much Farrakhan has been credited with rebuking the "pernicious
role model" of the Black Panther cum gangsta rapper, the Million Man March clearly
aimed at vindicating black manhood by creating "a new black patriarchy.,,3l
In the 1990s the Black Panthers remain a potent symbol. Rappers like Paris and the
late Tupac Shakur (whose mother, Assata Shakur, was a member of the New York 21)
have claimed the Panthers as black heroes; more than a few Public Enemy songs and
videos pay homage to Panther attributes (black berets, black leather jackets) and catch
phrases ("Power to the People"). As contemporary black men struggle to gain meaning
and control in their lives, it is no surprise that the Panthers imaging of black masculine
power and authority retains immense appeal. However, as former Panther leader Elaine
Brown cautioned in 1992, "a lot of young people look back on the Black Panther Party
and they see icons. But icons are a very dangerous thing to create. Icons make mistakes."
Critic bell hooks warns, further, that we should all vigilantly reconsider the icons we
identify with, lest we continue to perpetuate "the spectacle of contemporary colonization,
dehumanization, and disempowerment where the image serves as a murder weapon.,,32
Prompting that cultural critique demands revisualizing black experience and radical pol
itics in diverse and egalitarian terms, rather than placing faith in an imaging of black
power that the Black Panthers projected in the late 19608, and which continues to persist
in contemporary American culture.